1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to real-time transport control protocol and more specifically to implementing real-time transport control protocol to obtain an end-to-end encryption and security status of a communication session.
2. Introduction
Understanding media security conditions in a communication session can be an extremely difficult task. When users seek the encryption and security status of a call, they are typically unable to obtain the necessary information to make an accurate assessment of the end-to-end security status of the call, particularly as the size and complexity of the call increases. Without the necessary end-to-end security information, users are left with few—mostly imprecise—options, such as guessing the security status of the call, or simply assuming the call is insecure and unencrypted. All too often, users are left blind to the security conditions of the call. And to complicate matters for the user, the security conditions of the call can change throughout the life of the call, which further erodes the accuracy of the users security estimate. Overall, the process can be long and the experience frustrating and the outcome costly.
Engineers similarly have great difficulty identifying the security and encryption status of a call. Identifying the security and encryption status of a call is a formidable challenge precisely because the availability of relevant information is scarce: gathering the necessary information to perform a thorough analysis can be an expensive and onerous proposition. For example, often times, an engineer will attempt to ascertain the security and encryption status of a call. The engineer begins the process by trying to understand the conditions. What is the model of the endpoint being used? Is it a handset or a speaker phone? Does the endpoint have a direct media path to the far end, or is there a media gateway deployed in the media path? Is the gateway transcoding? Is there a conference bridge involved? Is the call signaling path secure? Is the media path encrypted? What is the network topology? How many devices are participating on the call? Are the other devices using encryption? Answers to these and many other questions are essential to identifying the security status of a call. Yet, currently, there are no existing tools that push this information out to the phones or session endpoints. Instead, engineers typically must deploy sniffers on the network to record the actual media received at a particular endpoint, an expensive and laborious process.
Real-time transport control protocol (RTCP) packets can be analyzed to obtain some relevant information. RTCP provides feedback on the media status in a real-time transport protocol (RTP) flow. In particular, RTCP packets provide a summary of the media quality and characteristics over a single hop of the media path. However, except in the limited case of a pair of endpoints with a direct media path, the end-to-end media traverses through multiple hops. Consequently, RTCP packets generally do not provide an end-to-end summary of the session. Moreover, RTCP packets do not provide much of the relevant encryption and security information needed to ascertain the true security and encryption conditions of the call. Thus, engineers do not have effective tools or techniques for determining the end-to-end security and encryption status of a media session. And while security for a media session is experienced on an end-to-end basis, engineers are unable to determine which element in the network path may have a different encryption and/or security status.